Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

  George squeezed my hand and sighed. ‘The bronze was melted down years ago, when the whole thing was emptied. A tragedy.’

  I looked at him, so unmoved by the armed presence in front of us. I wanted to turn back, but I didn’t want to appear fazed by something we should be so used to. His fingers didn’t even twitch, nor his palms sweat, and his brow only raised in surprise when I was struck dumb, unable to speak until we were well away from the wall of intimidation that we were faced with.

  He pressed on. ‘Did you ever see it? The Victoria monument?’ He gestured his arms up in the air to imitate the statue that no longer existed. He continued to walk forward and I stopped him, pulling him back towards the park. He laughed as we sloped back again towards the lake, further away from the palace gates.

  ‘They won’t bite,’ he said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. ‘Not with me anyway.’

  ‘Why are there so many of them?’

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘We need to protect it, don’t we? It belongs to us. Otherwise it’d be overrun with camps in no time. Like poor old Kenwood House. Filled with rot and disease. Auntie has to retain a sense of order somehow. There has to be some sense of control.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, thinking of Kenwood and its sloping expanse of grass, not realising that the people there had been placed deliberately, and given shelter. Rather than what our neighbours said: that they’d broken the windows and boarded up the doors, taken it for themselves. Still, I wondered what the point of the dissolution of the monarchy was when the palace still remained as it ever was, more so: guarded, separate, drawn away from the reality of the city. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘They need a place to go. Where do the people in the camps end up, eventually?’

  He squeezed my shoulder, ‘I wouldn’t worry about all that,’ he said. ‘Somewhere better than here, no doubt.’

  I looked back towards the palace. ‘Is Mrs P in there?’ I said, examining his face.

  He laughed. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘She just hasn’t decided what to do with it yet. So it stays empty.’ He reached up to a branch of an overhanging tree, plucked some foliage from it and dissolved it between his fingers, letting the last leaves fall to the ground.

  ‘What do you think she should do with it?’ We walked back to the bridge again, and he placed his hands on its railing.

  ‘Divide it up,’ he said. ‘Give it back to the people. Back to the people who it was taken from.’

  ‘The Royal Family?’

  ‘And the rest.’

  I wondered how many times he walked this path. The wall of armed police was supposed to deter him, but he most likely thought they were there for him: to guard a room or a wing he thought might belong to him one day. I slipped my hand out of his.

  We continued to walk the figure of eight, and I almost suggested walking to Trafalgar Square and sitting at its empty steps, but as we approached that side we saw a group of people huddled just outside the park’s railings.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said, as he took my hand again to circle us away and back in the direction of Westminster. There were placards scattered at the feet of five or so women, and they talked hurriedly between themselves.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, and tried to pull me back towards the bridge. Instead I stepped in their direction, feeling a pull towards the vulnerability of their sloped shoulders and long hair hanging together in a crouched huddle. Between them on the ground lay a prone body. At first I thought it was a fake plastic thing, an old mannequin, but I realised, by the way they were crowded round it, it was real; greying, clothed, rigid. I took another step.

  ‘Matilda,’ he said, but I barely heard him. It was a woman, her face bloodied and bruised, long drained of colour. The group of women around her didn’t look up as I approached. I wanted to call out, but George was next to me, pulling me away. ‘Leave them,’ he said.

  I tried to pull back, I tried to call out: what happened, but he started to drag me away.

  ‘Leave them,’ he said again, and squeezed the meat of my arm hard enough that I had to follow.

  ‘What happened to her?’ I said, trying to release my arm and comply by walking beside him.

  ‘Don’t worry about all that,’ he said, looking across the park and away from me, as though I were just a thing to scramble after him. He led me over the bridge once again and back out towards Westminster, an indication our walk was coming to an end. I didn’t ask him about their placards, I didn’t tell him what I’d seen, strewn amongst the blood and the littered body, the concerned women. One was face-up and stretched towards me on the path, a makeshift sign made out of an old poster. People always talked about it, Mrs P’s old slogan. But they’d turned it into a sign and painted on an extra word, slapped in black. England Still Isn’t Eating, it read.

  We ended up back at the tube and he left me with a firm kiss. I went down the stairs into the tunnel, too ashamed to ask anything from him, and too embarrassed to walk on, admitting I couldn’t afford the fare.

  My dress stuck to me, sweat dripping down my legs in the hot wind. I licked my top lip and thought expectantly of soaking myself in cold water when I got home, hoping my grandmother had left me some from the storage tank.

  I turned back from the mouth of the tube, walking down the steps. I wanted to remember the look of the buildings from that vantage point: Westminster in bright daylight, the day after I’d been with him. I wanted to store it in my brain, not for sentimentality, but something else. I had a blank curiosity; I wanted to know things about him, but when I looked I found the starkness of it froze all the answers away.

  Which is why I stole the papers I did. While he was asleep that morning, I walked around his hallway and opened doors, just as he said he’d dreamt, and laughed about. I opened the doors and peered inside and everything was blank. Especially the kitchen, which I imagined would be filled to the brim with all the illicit foods he’d given to me and that we’d tasted together. But the cupboards were almost empty. There was no trace anywhere of old bottles or remnants of the carcasses of forgotten vegetables.

  I realised it was because that was the smart thing to do. The smart thing was not to bring it to your house and leave things lying around, as I had done, as he’d made me do. I saw a few papers in his kitchen drawer where the unused polished silver utensils also lay (giant serving forks and knifes for parties he didn’t host) and I took a few sheets. The image of the first page struck me: a structured lattice, a beehive; the second was lists and lists of illicit ingredients, food you couldn’t get here, food we dreamt of like children. All written down in ink with scrawled numbers next to them. There was more I didn’t take and stapled packages I didn’t touch.

  I entered the heat of the tube and checked for the two leaves of paper I had hidden in my bag. I stood by the gates, watched by the guards, which made my hands shake and the coins rattle around, and scrambled together most of the money I had to take the tube home. I was alone in the carriage, when it arrived after ten minutes. I rode the line all the way to West Hampstead as I looked at the papers. They meant little to me, but they were plans for a future. As the train rattled on I hoped it was a plan to save us, a plan for something better. The carriage shook and wobbled, and I steadied myself, holding onto my seat. As the train bundled into the open air, nearing my stop, I held them until the edges crinkled. I knew I wouldn’t ask him about them, but he’d notice their absence. I would lie to him, I decided then and there. But despite that, I hoped that there was hope, after all. They had plans and options. We knew the government’s money was going somewhere. But I couldn’t ask him.

  I closed my eyes on the train and imagined it full of people, bodies sweating in the heat, people pushing against your back and treading on your feet. Obnoxiously refusing to lift their bag from the seat next to them, or leaning against the yellow pole and taking up space for people to grip onto. But London was starting to feel like a ghost town. Even in my memory it was dense with bodies, there was still the jostling and stru
ggle in public spaces. The tipping point happened so quickly, for it to feel like a different city entirely. To stop seeing birds wheeling in the sky, to stop bumping into people in the street, to stop asking people how their parents were doing, to stop thinking things would be different.

  A carriage door forced open with a whooshing sound and a guard slammed the door behind him. The carriage was empty. He came towards me, hand on his baton. I looked up at him, nodded to him. He opened his mouth to talk to me, releasing his hand. He had a patch of dark stubble on his cheek that he must have missed when shaving, and I was close enough to see his teeth yellow and shining. There were marks of sweat on his baton left from the indents of his fingers.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, standing up in front of him, the train nearing my stop. I kept my eyes focused on his hands as I brushed past him. He stepped towards the door.

  ‘You be careful now, Miss,’ he said, kicking the door until it slid open, gesturing for me to descend. I clutched my bag close to me, and didn’t look back the whole way home.

  I don’t know why I feared the police as much as I did. It was just a feeling: a sick, panicked feeling in the way they held themselves. Because we’d all lost, hadn’t we? After the blackout, and rations were brought in, none of us were exempt from the panic: cars stuck in the street, families separated, scavenging in supermarkets, draining the rivers and lakes for water. No one had won. Not in any country. But why did the police look like they had? How had they maintained a sense of decorum? I wondered what they had fought for, and how they had fought for it. Who they knew, and why it mattered. Why they walked around in that eerie way like they’d been given a gift. Like they couldn’t be touched, but they knew that we could, in every small way. They knew they could be the ones to touch us.

  I took what I wanted, too. But it was for something different than him; it was just for hope, for hope, for hope.

  I carried the papers with me wherever I went. I was terrified. The idea of them being found on me was worse than the idea of the stolen ration card George offered me. But still I longed to know what they meant, and eagerly awaited another party to try and find out. He called regularly, and my grandmother answered the phone each time, her voice a high tone of joy, even though she spoke to me with a sort of melancholy. She encouraged me, and encouraged him no doubt, and every time he arrived at our house with produce it was reinforced in her mind that this was the only option I had. He invited the both of us to Gloria’s house again, for a spot of dinner. He had a small sneer on his face when he asked my grandmother, knowing she would say no (vous faites le fou!), but doing it to win her favour.

  He also began, in that time, to call me ‘my dear’, and he held my arm as he did so. I noted the air of possession. I enjoyed it with glee when it first began. But every time after he would hold my arm, I would think of his stark kitchen, and that one room that held strange possessions, and my poor smitten grandmother, and the blankness, and the papers, and there wasn’t a word for my uneasiness that I could express. The way he held me like he held other things he owned, watching me with both delight and control. It was more than the usual melancholy with the world that pervaded everyone, the malaise that pierced me. I saw it in my grandmother as well, every time I left the house. Every time I left her sitting in her chair by the fireplace (untouched in the heat of summer, but still the focal point of the room), every time she murmured to me in French and I pretended she had spoken in English, and she dismissed my fake appropriation. Every time she pushed me out the door, saying the neighbours had been checking in on her more recently, so she was never alone. She encouraged me, but her encouragement was full of a sadness that didn’t have a name, in any language, but that triggered her to talk about my mother more and more.

  ‘Margot and I ate garlic potatoes together when she was a teenager and I imagined her children, just as you are now, just that look on your face, and the way you say Maman, just like that.’ She laughed.

  She could see I was leaving her every time I stepped from our house. But there was no other way.

  I would lie in my bed on the nights I wasn’t with him, and I would call to my mother, in a whisper. I would think of the years between us, and count them (thirteen). I would ask her to come to me, and tell her now is the time and I wasn’t afraid, she could come and see me. I would blink in the darkness and imagine shapes and think that she might appear in-between them. That she might tell me an answer to a question. She never did.

  I went to his house again before the dinner party. ‘My dear, my dear,’ he whispered, and he unbuttoned my shirt in the kitchen (an old workman’s shirt – my late Uncle’s? – blue, faded, too large for me). He switched the electric lights on now without a thought, without checking to see my reaction, without thinking about it. I watched him do it, and I watched his face in the stark bright light and kept my eyes open, always, in fascination that this was how he lived.

  He placed a hand around my bare stomach and reached to my back, with a kind of intimacy accorded to those who know you very well. Where before the slightest touch was a crossing of huge gaping canyons, now the gap had been closed, there was no gap to be granted back. A rejection, a pushing away, would signify something greater than it would have only a few weeks before. Oh, I chose it all too, I conceded to his hands on me and welcomed it. But with that welcoming was a hesitancy that grew.

  With the pulling of each faded button I was immobilised further. I did the same, I pulled at his buttons. He said to me, ‘We’ll go together to Gloria’s, we’ll go together.’

  ‘You said you could help me.’

  ‘I will help you,’ he said. I said take me, I told him to, I could have said, even, possess me. He told me I was his little bird. ‘I’ll look after you.’ He said it as his hands were on me, and he pushed me back a little, against the counter, and then up, on top of the stark clean surface. I looked towards the utensil drawer and he bit my neck. A sharp bite.

  ‘Ouch,’ I said, but it did make me hungry, and I pushed my knees towards him, around him.

  Afterwards, we lay on the tiled floor. I looked underneath the counters, just in case, but there was nothing there.

  ‘Matilda,’ he said. ‘If you need anything, you’ll tell me.’ He placed a hand on my stomach. ‘Even this, I’d give to you. Whatever you need.’

  I looked at him, I frowned, and placed a hand back across his stomach, wide and rising and falling with breath that was deep and piercing. ‘I don’t,’ I said, ‘I don’t want that.’

  He laughed. ‘I didn’t think so. Or you’d have it already.’

  I waited. I tapped my fingers on his stomach, waiting for him to say the other: that he could help me the other way. With money, bribery, anything.

  He sighed. ‘I don’t want to say. But I helped Jaminder last year. Gave her the money. There’s no chance of them ever getting hold of her now, no possibility she’ll ever be made to, no physical option.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’ Even though, of course, I did. She told me she’d had everything taken out at that second party, and I should have assumed it was him. I moved my hand away. I felt across the floor for my shirt and pulled away from him. I sat up and started to button it. Top to bottom. With each button I waited, I told myself, with the next button I’ll know, I’ll know what to say. Wait for the next one. I got to the last and smoothed down my shirt. He was looking up at me, he was smiling. I smiled back at him.

  ‘What is it you want from me?’ I said, kindly. ‘Is there something that you want, other than this?’

  ‘I just want you,’ he said. He pulled me back down beside him. My thighs rubbed against the cold tiles as he pulled me towards him. I shivered, even with the heat burning outside the window. ‘I want to know you. Your fingers and your toes,’ he touched them, ‘your body and your hair, and that look on your face. I want you, all of you.’

  I crawled closer to the expanse of his body and wrapped my body around it. I knew then, that I could never ask him. That I couldn
’t take all that I wanted from him. Because it would mean, perhaps, owing him my fingers and my toes, and I still needed them. They were still my own.

  I took the papers with me to Gloria’s house and heard them crinkle – as she hugged me – as loud as an old train, but she didn’t move or flinch or look at me strangely. I brought them to show to Jaminder, imagined laying them out in the bathroom and asking her. But, as it was, I couldn’t find her.

  I stayed by his side like a loyal dog that evening, looking up at him, always, to gauge his reaction to everything and watch the line of his sight and where it landed. In turn, he held my hand and patted it at various intervals, and I caught snippets of conversation. Domestic borders. Fever. Sugar imports. Sea levels. I imagined the expanse of the sea the way you might imagine a relative you know well in your blood but can’t remember meeting. I feared I would never meet her again.

  His friends talked to each other in an excited, doting way, of their various initiatives and projects, what their ministry had invested in. I listened and said nothing.

  I noticed Gloria, unusually on her own, standing in the corner and eyeing everyone as though searching for something. As though waiting something out.

  ‘I haven’t seen Gwendolyn tonight?’ I said, looking up at George, amongst his friends. They stopped talking then, and one of them coughed, eyes on his wine glass.

  ‘Oh, she got sick of the lack of prawn in the prawn cocktail no doubt.’ George said, without missing a beat. His friends laughed, and took another sip of their drinks, and went back to talking about closed borders and Scandinavia’s record harvest.

  Each conversation like this made me hopeful he was involved in something crucial, some life-giving force, and I waited expectantly for it to be revealed. But every time I alluded to it, he dismissed my questions.

  They talked about many things I’d never seen. Lands I could only imagine, and the spaces between them, the significant space of the ocean that separated us from all of them. I thought of reaching the place in the world where the sea meets the sky and the blues bleeding into each other, a worldly mess. In that meeting I imagined inserting my fingers, one by one, feeling the tips of them turn blue. I could turn that blue of the earth and become it. I could die, that way, in that blue, a returning, and I wouldn’t be afraid of it and I’d be happy to go back to the world and bleed into it the same way I arrived.